The World

Monday-Thursday 7PM, Friday 6PM

Hosted by
Lisa Mullins, Marco Werman

PRI's "The World" brings one-of-a-kind international stories home to America. Each weekday, host Lisa Mullins guides listeners through major issues and stories, linking global events directly to the American agenda.

The civil war in Syria may be entering a decisive phase. Forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have seized almost all of the key city of Aleppo from rebels. Some analysts are talking about the end of the war. But how do wars end?

Americans tend to think of wars ending with the unconditional surrender of one side, as happened in World War II and in America’s own Civil War. But that’s pretty unusual, according to Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, and author of the book, “How Wars End.”

There are many ways that President-elect Donald Trump has begun the process of doing exactly what he promised on the campaign trail vis-a-vis immigration. He’s chosen for his cabinet hard-liners on immigration and continued his tough rhetoric on who we allow into the US as refugees.

Artist Yang Kyung-soo believes South Korean office culture represents a mix of two things: Confucianism and military hierarchy.

The result is an atmosphere in which employees must “follow their boss’ orders without exception,” the 32-year-old says, adding the he doesn’t think office workers "have any freedom to express their own opinions at their jobs.”

This top-down dynamic is the subject of his popular single-frame illustration series called "Yakchjkii."

Mohammad Sayed is unstoppable. At the age of 19, he is already an inventor and entrepreneur. One half of his business, called RimPower, is providing assistive technologies. The other half is a comic book series centered around the hero Wheelchair Man.

“My goal is to help people in wheelchair[s] both psychologically and physically,” he says. “A world where every wheelchair user is empowered rather than disabled."

Protesters at the Standing Rock Camp in North Dakota spent Sunday evening celebrating: The Army Corps of Engineers said it wouldn't give permission for the Dakota Access Pipeline to run under the Missouri River.

Celebrations were cut short, though, when a ferocious blizzard rolled into the area, with wind gusts up to 50 mph and wind chills near 20 below zero. The camp itself was buried in snow drifts as high as 7 feet.

The spike of hate incidents from coast to coast in recent weeks is alarming. In the 10 days following the election of Donald Trump, the Southern Poverty Law Center recorded more than 800 real-world incidents — and that doesn’t even begin to include instances of online harassment.

George Soros, the Holocaust survivor and billionaire philanthropist, wants to track — and combat — this increase in hate incidents. Last month, he announced he would donate $10 million to fight hate crimes nationwide.

The Israeli government offers cash and free flights to African asylum seekers who agree to return home or fly to other African countries — an incentive to get them to leave. The measure is bringing down the number of African migrants in Israel, currently about 45,000.

But an inadvertent effect of this policy is that some African men — hoping to get smuggled to Europe — are abandoning their families in Israel to claim the government cash.

Courtesy of the&nbsp;<a href="http://archives.ihrc.umn.edu/vitrage/all/ha/ihrc894.html">Philip Khuri Hitti Papers</a>, Immigration History Research Center Archives, University of Minnesota

By 2020, every high school student in California’s public and charter schools will be able to take at least one ethnic studies class.

It’s thanks to a bill that California state Rep. Luis Alejo and the California Latino Legislative Caucus. In doing so, they joined the ranks of educators, students, activists and elected officials who have pushed for courses that better reflect America’s changing demographics.

The classic image we have of the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro is that of a bearded man in military fatigues — the uniform of revolution. But in his later years, Castro donned another outfit: the retiree tracksuit.

Castro did officially retire from Cuba's presidency in 2006 — though he continued to heavily influence the island nation's leadership — putting his brother Raul in power, where he remains to this day.

Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday lashed populists seeking to exploit Germany's refugee influx, but as she launched into election campaign mode, Merkel set down a tough line on integration — including a ban on the veil worn by many Muslim women.

You could be forgiven for thinking Europe is coming undone these days.

First there was Brexit, when British voters chose to leave the European Union. And there's been the rise of parties opposed to European integration in several countries including France, the Netherlands and Germany.

This past weekend, voters in Italy rejected changes in their constitution, turning against their pro-EU leader Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. He has announced his resignation.

Residents put some of the blame for that on home-sharing websites like Airbnb. They say these sites allow landlords to fill their apartments with lucrative short-term rentals instead of more affordable long-term ones.

The odds were stacked against Mamadou Sissoko arriving at Sciences Politiques, better known as Sciences Po, one of France’s most elite universities. He was born in Mali, and at the age of 7, moved to a Paris immigrant suburb. It’s a place where people don’t talk much about the highest echelon of the country’s higher-education system.

“I didn’t know what Sciences Po was,” Sissoko says, “until my last year of high school.”

Marta Sam is surrounded by really energetic 4-year-olds. She’s at St. Martin’s Day Care in Erie, Pennsylvania, guiding the kids as they sing and dance.

Sam sings in Arabic, then English. She takes the students through a Congolese song, followed by "Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed." The kids follow her cues, dancing and calling out their favorite songs. Sam is used to this.

After many months of protests — and with tensions mounting — the Army Corp of Engineers announced the Dakota Access Pipeline would not, for now at least, be able to pass through the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.

There’s been another upset at the polls. In terms of size and population, The Gambia doesn't come close to the United States. But like in the States, few thought there was any chance of an upset in presidential elections that were held Thursday across The Gambia.

So much for experts, again.

“I hereby declare Adama Barrow duly elected president of the Republic of Gambia for the next five years,'' Alieu Momarr Njai, the head of the election commission, announced Friday.

There are a lot of great opening lines in literature. But this one by the late Gabriel Garcia-Marquez is among the best: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

That's the way he starts the book "One Hundred Years of Solitude." The novel is a masterpiece of magical realism, a world where magical elements blend into reality.

Fifty-three years ago, the United States came closer to nuclear war than ever before, or since.

For 13 days in October 1962 — during the Cuban Missile Crisis — America's nuclear arsenal was kept on high alert. There were nuclear missiles just 90 miles from US soil, in Fidel Castro's Cuba. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev could have launched a nuclear strike within minutes.